


Sleep No More

by cipherwriter



Series: Halligan's Adventures as the Spiral [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Episode: e074 Fatigue (The Magnus Archives), Exhaustion, Gen, Sleep Deprivation, The Spiral, anyway lydia becomes an avatar of the spiral, i won't even call this an au this is my real headcanon, unreality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:07:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24221065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cipherwriter/pseuds/cipherwriter
Summary: Lydia Halligan wrote a statement for the Magnus Institute. It did not include everything.
Relationships: Lydia Halligan & Michael | The Distortion
Series: Halligan's Adventures as the Spiral [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1776739
Comments: 8
Kudos: 26





	Sleep No More

There is a man in Lydia’s armchair. At least, that’s how she thinks of the creature in her house. She didn’t let him in. She hasn’t met him. 

Those are both only true in the most literal sense. 

Lydia doesn’t like to talk to other insomniacs she sees. The fellow dull-eyed patrons of local diners and 24 hour cafes that saw a kindred spirit in her. But she’s not like them, not like they think.

At the start, she’d talk to them, those that approached first. Hushed voices over coffee of varying qualities about nothing and everything. There was anonymity here, the unspoken agreement to forget each other during the day if you saw them on the street. And they gave tips on how to fall asleep, always. Obviously it hadn’t worked for them, but maybe it could work for her. Said with tired smiles, hopeful eyes, a desire for her to offer something up in return. She’d say nothing, put her mug up to her lips to punctuate her silence.

She had no tips, no tricks. She didn’t try the ones she was given. Once upon a time she had. When her parents noticed in her teens that she may have had a real problem, wasn’t just a restless child. Nothing helped, not the meds and not the breathing techniques and not the turning out the lights an hour (two hours three hours before bed) and not the going to bed the same time everyday and not the not the not the, and nothing stuck with her after all this time.

She’s different from the rest of them, all so young, so new. They remembered true rest, a childhood of energy that she had never known. She has nothing to miss. 

She’s better than them. It’s not fair, not right, a bad way to think of these things she knows, but god, why should she even care anymore? So yeah, she’s better than the other insomniacs that try to sleep, that had not been born into this life and she’s better than her friends in college that hadn’t ever even made it past a paltry forty hours awake. She’s better than herself when she was a teenager and had wanted so badly for the treatments to work.

She wants to want it, sometimes. Very badly. She knows that that’s the right thing, the healthy thing, but what good has it ever done her? Wanting to sleep had never made it happen, the desperation that thrummed in her veins every waking hour (every hour) had never helped her.

But god, it was still there.

“Names are overrated.” His voice is light and heavy, a discordant melody, the tone not matching anything that Lydia can put a finger on. There is something separate about it, as though the voice does not come from the mouth and throat of the man in the armchair but is simply made from vibrations in the air.

Lydia does not know when her ears started ringing. It seems there’s a lot she doesn’t know right now.

How are you today? Which day do you mean? It’s very funny, evidently, her confusion. Or maybe her wording.

She hopes it’s her wording. A good writer causes a reaction with their words, so she’ll be glad even if that reaction is laughter that makes her nose bleed.

She hears the laugh again when she tries to sleep that night, so she stops trying.

The man is in her armchair again (still?) the next day. He looks longer now, stretched out. He smiles at her like the ringing in her ears, like the buzz of static in her head and behind her eyes. The pulsing at the edges of her vision seems to grow stronger.

“Good morning,” he says and Lydia looks out the window to make sure it is, in fact, morning. The sun is rising on the billboard outside and it turns the curling, twisting steam off the (presumed) coffee the same burnished red as the rusty metal it’s on.

He laughs again, less this time, and Lydia looks back at him. “Had to make sure,” she says. “It’s not like time means much,” she says. She doesn’t know why she tells him these things.

Lydia feels like she should be embarrassed. She doesn’t keep up her appearance as much as she had, once upon a time when she was part of the real world, but she still wants the privacy to not be seen in her pajamas in her own home. But this man is, well, he’s an old friend. She feels that in her bones. 

“It’ll get easier eventually,” the man says. He is no longer smiling, or perhaps he is now actually smiling for the first time. Whatever it is, it is kinder. He is long and twisty and boneless in her chair, but he seems more human now than before. “At some point, you’ll love it.”

“I already love it,” Lydia says, a rebellion. Her eyes are burning.

The creature laughs. It is like a color blindness test that Lydia is failing and this time her ears hurt and bleed along with her nose. “You do not even know what love is yet.”

It is right. She doesn’t. But she is learning.

Lydia finds a diner that no one else goes to. It is terrible. Disgusting coffee and grease on the table that make it entirely unromanticizable, which is the main quality the conversational sleepless diner-goers look for in an eatery. So it is just her and the waitress and the cook that she never sees and does not order food from. There may not even actually be a cook. She can no longer believe what she can see, she’s certainly not going to start believing in what she can’t. Unless that’s the realest of it all, the things she can’t see. Maybe she’s the one making everything else around her not real.

She’s going insane, probably. 

She does not lose the tooth. That’s not why she can’t give it away. It slots itself into her mouth where there should not be a slot and she runs her tongue over it. It still tastes like shitty coffee. 

It never stops tasting like coffee. Isn’t that funny? That this is her lot in life now? She finds more teeth in her mouth and she cannot recall if they grew there or if they came from other cups of coffee, too.

It is snowing out, now. Wasn’t it just June? Maybe it still is. Anything can happen now.

She is in a park. It is night. It is always night when she does things. She is walking with a stick in her hands, and though she’s only just become conscious of this moment, she knows what she is doing already. She is drawing. She is drawing a spiral. She is probably drawing many spirals.

The creature, her friend, is there, just off the path of the spiral. She has not drawn it there yet, but it’s there. It has always been there, the spirals are always there under everything. 

Lydia remembers something. She doesn’t know when it is from, if it has even truly happened yet. 

“‘That’s okay,’ you said, when I told you I hadn’t slept,” Lydia says as she draws. “Why did you say that?”

“What would telling you it was not okay have done?”

“What did telling me it was okay do?”

Her friend is silent for a moment, in as much as it can be silent with its background radiation of sound. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. But I could have used it when I was starting out.”

“You’re making too much sense,” Lydia says.

“I do that sometimes. Bad habit of mine.”

It’s Lydia’s turn to laugh. When her friend winces, she feels it. It spikes fear in it. She didn’t think she could do that.

“Have you made your Statement yet?” It asks her. 

Lydia thinks for a moment. That’s been getting harder. “It’s already written, whether the archives have gotten it or not.” 

Her friend hums. Its sound cannot be compared to anything else. Some things are like that.

Lydia is still tired. It makes her tear up, sometimes it makes her scream. She wants to succumb to sleep. Then she thinks about the words she uses, “succumb to sleep,” and it makes her sick. Lydia does not succumb to anything. She is strong, but she still needs sleep. They are not mutually exclusive. 

She still can’t think of it any other way.

She gets an email from a writing magazine. She was hired to write a story about living with insomnia. She had. It had evidently been “disturbing and difficult to understand at alternating intervals.” She does not know if this is praise or not.

The manic highs of fatigue make her run until she can’t, until she collapses and sleep still will not come for her, and the words ”sleep no more” flash through her mind though she has not yet seen them as her friend laughs and laughs. She knows she can’t sleep anymore, and so does it. They both like to laugh at how foolish she can be.

On June 8th, 2015, the Magnus Institute receives a statement from Lydia Halligan. She says she walks into a billboard and it collapses onto her. The archivist says she dies of a heart attack less than a month after giving the statement.

Lydia Halligan does walk into a billboard. She walks into a billboard, The billboard, its rust matching the blood always dripping from her nose, on July 2nd, 2015. As it collapses onto her, into her, she dies. And it is peaceful.

When the coroner arrives, her body is on the ground of a roundabout near her flat. Heart attack, seemingly brought on by exhaustion and an overuse of caffeine. She is by an advert for a movie coming out in theaters that Fall. The advert is taken down, and that billboard, the only that has ever been in that roundabout, is never filled again. People seem to think it’s bad luck.

There is a being. It shows up to Lydia’s funeral. There are deep bags under its eyes, bags of rainbow colors in swirling shapes. If you look at it from the right angle, it looks as though it were scribbled onto the world in ink. Its nose and mouth sit on its face like the hands of a clock. There are very few people at the funeral, and even fewer can see it. Those who do say nothing.

They are this creature's first meal in its new life.

It looks at the tombstone, once everyone has gone. Lydia Halligan: Loving Daughter. There are no other words. The creature traces over them and its fingers leave swirling ink marks behind. 

Lydia’s friend has come. It is tall with impossibly long fingers and impossibly curled hair and impossible impossible impossible. It has brought flowers.

“That is what people do, is it not?”

“That’s what everyone else did.”

It does not matter who said what, or even if it were said. The two beings are not the same but they are very close.

“You could have rested.” Lydia’s friend says.

“No I couldn’t have,” the creature with many teeth and coffee on its breath says. “I chose this long ago.”

Lydia had been unable to sleep. Lydia had chosen not to sleep, had challenged her body over and over, had embraced the tormented artist she was becoming. Both are true. Many things can be true at once.

“Yes.” Lydia’s friend says. Its smile is sad, and when the lips twist like the feeling of pulling out hair, the younger creature feels the comfort of belonging. Of embracing itself (even when its self is not a self at all anymore).

At last, it has learned what love is.

**Author's Note:**

> i love lydia so much and i love michael so much. i will probably make this a series


End file.
